A bag of lunar dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission is returned to Nancy Lee Carlson, of Inverness. The bag is considered priceless but was mistakenly sold by the government to an Inverness woman, who was awarded ownership in court last week. (Emma Gutheinz, courtesy of Christopher McHugh)

A bag of lunar dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission is returned to Nancy Lee Carlson, of Inverness. The bag is considered priceless but was mistakenly sold by the government to an Inverness woman, who was awarded ownership in court last week. (Emma Gutheinz, courtesy of Christopher McHugh)

As a child, Nancy Lee Carlson watched in fascination as the astronauts of Apollo 11 bounced across the surface of the moon, collecting rocks to bring back to earth.

She never dreamed she would come to possess her own piece of the lunar surface, her lawyer said. But after winning a landmark legal battle, Carlson returned home to the Chicago suburbs Tuesday, the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind bag of moon dust.

Carlson had purchased the bag in 2015 for $995 when it was put up for sale in an online government auction because of a bureaucratic mix-up. But when the Inverness woman sent the artifact to NASA to test it — and officials there found it contained the unique hallmarks of moon dust — they decided they would not return it.

That prompted a legal battle that ended with a federal judge ordering the space agency to return what government attorneys described as a priceless national treasure.

A priceless bag of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission has been returned to a Chicago-area woman after she won a landmark legal victory against NASA.

The white bag itself appears unremarkable, about the size of a dinner plate, with a zipper and a tear in it.

But the bag is made of beta cloth, a fireproof silica fiber similar to the material used in space suits. The container was used on the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, NASA reported, as the outer decontamination bag to store the first lunar samples collected on the mission by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Government attorneys argued that the bag rightfully belonged to NASA, and that Carlson only hoped to make a "windfall profit" from selling it.

NASA issued a statement that read in part: "This artifact was never meant to be owned by an individual. ... We believe (it) belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred."

Indeed, how Carlson came to possess the celestial souvenir is a space odyssey in its own right.

Previously, the government had seized the bag in a criminal case against Max Ary, the former president of a space museum in Kansas. He was convicted in 2006 of theft for selling objects from the museum, court records show.

While investigating Ary, authorities learned the moon bag had been auctioned off for $24,150 and seized it from its purchaser. But because of a mix-up with another bag that did not contain moon dust, no NASA official at the time was aware of the historical importance of the artifact. The bag containing the lunar dust went to the U.S. Marshals Service, and was put up for auction at forfeiture.gov, to obtain restitution in the criminal case.

The initial auction asked for a beginning offer of at least $20,000, but nobody bid on it. When Carlson, a corporate attorney and avid collector of space objects, saw the bag at auction again in February 2015, she was the high bidder.

After receiving the bag in the mail, Carlson stored it in her bedroom closet. She tried to verify its authenticity by contacting officials at the Field Museum in Chicago, who referred her to Johnson Space Center in Houston. She contacted the curator of lunar samples there, and sent him the bag for testing.

There, in April of last year, NASA officials verified that the dust in the bag was in fact from the moon and had become embedded into the fabric of the bag. Moon dust is not like its earthly counterpart, in part because there is no water and little atmosphere to erode it, so it's full of pointy microscopic particles that stick to just about anything with which they come in contact.

After a yearlong court battle, a federal judge on Friday ordered NASA officials to hand over the bag. The exchange took place Monday at the space center in Houston, and Carlson hired a security firm to take charge of the bag, rather than keeping it in her house.

Noting the "amazing technical achievements, skill and courage" that NASA workers showed in obtaining the objects, U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten previously had urged Carlson and the government to amicably resolve the dispute to recognize both their legitimate interests.

McHugh said Carlson would consider allowing the bag to be displayed publicly, and she is expected to make an announcement by the end of the week.

It marks the only known case in which a private citizen has won ownership of a lunar object that the government had previously sold, apparently by mistake, attorneys involved said.

But the moon dust bag is just one of at least hundreds of lunar objects that have been become part of a pricey, worldwide black market.

In fact, one of the attorneys on the case, Joseph Gutheinz, is a former special investigator for NASA who, in all other cases, has argued that privately owned lunar objects should be returned to the space agency.

He estimates that over time, the U.S. government has given away about 270 moon rocks to foreign nations and dignitaries as well as about 100 to the states. Many ended up on the black market, and he has helped recover them for the government through an undercover sting and other investigations. But there are still about 158 lunar objects unaccounted for, he said.

The only other legitimate sale of lunar material that Gutheinz knew of was the 1993 sale of moon rocks from an unmanned Russian space mission, for $442,500.

The case of the moon dust bag comes at a time of renewed interest in space exploration. President Donald Trump was expected to announce a return to human space missions Tuesday, and the private company SpaceX announced this week that it hopes to bring tourists to orbit the moon next year.

"Millions of people are intrigued by space around the world," Gutheinz said. "(Carlson) is one of them. She loves space. And she had the gumption not to back down."